dawn.vogel | June 25, 2024
My microfiction piece “Seeds of Knowledge” was inspired by watching some videos about the Svalbard seed vault in Norway and imagining how a similar facility on an alien planet, where explorers don’t read the language, might look. Compared to other stories in Dead-Starred Futures, it seems a bit more positive on the surface, but the lack […]
dawn.vogel | June 5, 2024
Addison Smith’s Fractured Realities (2024) is another great collection of sci-fi and fantasy fiction in small stories. There’s a mix of drabbles, microfiction, flash fiction, and a few short stories, with a trend toward stories that pack a lot of emotion into few words. The stories in this collection include a number of previously published stories […]
dawn.vogel | May 30, 2024
My microfiction story, “One Book, Never Published,” is a brief look at how time-travel to prevent the publication of a book filled with falsehoods might turn out. If you’ve been following my posts about the stories in Dead-Starred Futures, you may already know that the answer to that is “not entirely well.” But despite that […]
dawn.vogel | May 3, 2024
If you’re looking for ideas for writing long or short sci-fi, check out this list of sci-fi writing prompts from Jericho Writers! They’ve got them grouped into different subjects, including ideas for sci-fi horror and sci-fi for kids!
dawn.vogel | April 30, 2024
“Bigger than the Big Bang” is a flash fiction story in Dead-Starred Futures involving a flash of premonition and the lengths one woman goes to in order to keep that premonition from coming to pass. Though that might not sound much like a sci-fi story, it also involves hacking and a bit of espionage. Oddly enough, […]
dawn.vogel | March 28, 2024
In addition to the short stories I’ve talked about previously, Droplets from the Universe contains a number of joyful sci-fi poems and a couple of very short fiction pieces. The fiction pieces include “Explore Savois,” a microfiction piece written as a tourism enticement for an out-of-the-way planet, and “Life on Pluto,” a very tongue-in-cheek drabble (exactly […]
dawn.vogel | March 26, 2024
“Light for Life” is a microfiction story that looks at a world in which growing plants has become a difficult proposition and the sorts of trades a person needs to make to be able to grow food. It’s certainly a dystopic world, but it also reflects places in our world in which climate change has […]
dawn.vogel | February 29, 2024
“When Science and the Gods Fail” is a microfiction story about a robot who takes matters into their own hands when calamity strikes. However, since this is one of my darker sci-fi stories … well, I’ll let you guess at the ending, but I won’t say anything more than that. “When Science and the Gods […]
dawn.vogel | February 28, 2024
The Hitherto Secret Experiments of Marie Curie, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Henry Herz (Blackstone Publishing, 2023), is a speculative fiction anthology that blends historical fact about Marie Curie’s life as a young woman and fantastical, science fiction, and horror elements to present new and intriguing experiments a young Marie might have undertaken. Most […]
dawn.vogel | February 27, 2024
One of the stories in Wreathed in Steam has the longest title of my published pieces to date: “Twelve Essential Things Found in Commander Scarlett Archer’s Spacesuit Pockets (And Some Which Were Not)”. I normally shorten it to “Twelve Essential Things …” for obvious reasons. The title pretty much tells you the plot of the story, […]
